Cybersecurity firm Secureworks is the subject of much Wall Street discussion as reports emerge that majority stakeholder Dell Technologies might take the company off the public market. Dell currently owns 86 percent of Secureworks and is reportedly considering buying back outstanding shares, people familiar with the situation stated. The decision to buy Secureworks outright could be a departure from the Texas-based tech firm's earlier plans to sell Secureworks that was first reported by Reuters last February.
Secureworks released its third-quarter 2020 results last month, reporting $141.3 million in revenue - a 6.2 percent increase from the previous year. The firm also reported a GAAP net loss of $7.9 million or $0.10 on a per-share basis. The results generally outpaced analyst expectations and stocks rose 15.6 percent in response to the favorable reports.
“In the world of accelerating digital transformation and complex technology ecosystems, effective security programs require a more agile and scalable model,” said Michael Cote, CEO of Secureworks, in a call to analysts. “Our model goes beyond prevention alone, to leverage the powerful combination of machine and human intelligence and the community.”
Cote points to his firm’s partnerships with other market-leading security and technology companies as key to providing its customers with the most advanced threat detection and response solutions available. The Georgia-based business plans to fully leverage its relationships with parent company Dell and sister company VMware to further those goals. It’s also making efforts to move beyond its managed-security-services-provider base with new managed detection and security response (MDR) and other SaaS-based cybersecurity services.
In November, Secureworks rolled out its Red Cloak Threat Detection and Response (TDR) system to augment its Dell Safeguard and Response suite of offerings. In partnership with Microsoft, the TDR technology will uptake raw telemetry from MS's Defender Advanced Threat Protection – providing a broader and deeper pool of data for Red Cloak's advanced analytics to process.
Microsoft will, in turn, benefit from the wider threat vector lens provided by Secureworks' broad exposure through a variety of endpoint, network, cloud, and business systems provided by thousands of its customer IT environments. These new offerings will be made available to Dell, Microsoft ATP, and O365 customers as part of their security suites.
Secureworks was founded in 1999 and is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. They blend the best of both machine learning and human intelligence to provide industry-leading software security services to 4,100 customers spanning 50 countries. The company has chosen to specialize in cybersecurity since its start twenty years ago and offers smart solutions that scale, simplify, and spend intelligently. Dell acquired Secureworks in 2011 and made a minority stake available through an initial public offering in 2016.
